How Whitecoat found peace of mind with Via24

Since founder Tom Walker set up shop 15 years ago, Whitecoat have grown into a decorated, multi-disciplinary agency, providing branded content for some of the world’s largest companies and branching out into long form video. After several years of expansion, Whitecoat outgrew their initial shared storage, and started looking for a more advanced solution that would allow them to perform managed offsite backups…

By Liz Sunter May 04, 2018

“We’d been using a the same storage solution since the company started, but we’d really outgrown it,” explained Tom. “As fast as we were emptying it, we were filling it up again.”

Whitecoat were looking for an alternative solution when a meeting with our team at BVE brought Dynamic Drive Pool storage to their attention. “Jigsaw24 suggested DDP, and after seeing a demo on their stand it was obvious that for what we were doing, it was much better. The expandability, the level of control over users and the control over SSD versus HDD were all things we needed.”

“Working with the Jigsaw24 support team is a world away from how we’ve found other providers. It’s been amazing. Whenever something goes wrong, someone’s instantly working to find a fix, and we trust the decisions that their team make. ”

Getting 100% peace of mind with offsite backup

Once they had transitioned to DDP, Whitecoat were able to start looking into automated offsite backup – their previous storage had struggled to move the amount of data they needed in the time they had available, but they were confident the newer DDP had the performance they needed to instigate the remote, automated backup workflow insurers advised them to adopt.

Our team worked with Whitecoat to design and implement an automated backup strategy that leverages DDP’s excellent Ethernet performance to back up each day’s work overnight to a second DDP system housed in our Clerkenwell datacentre. This means they should only ever lose one day’s work if their onsite storage fails, rather than entire projects.

“We’ve had our RAID die in the past and it’s been an absolute nightmare – we’ve always wanted to guard against it ever happening again,” said Tom. “Having managed backup gives us as close to 100% peace of mind as we can get, which is absolutely essential for a company working at the level we are now.”

Outsourced day to day support

Whitecoat don’t have any internal tech staff, so as well as providing help with major projects like colocated shared storage and backup, we provide day to day support for all their end users.

“We’d suffered in the past because different vendors and IT providers would pass jobs off to one another, so we wanted to have everything in one place so everyone would know about everything, and there’d be no issues with communication,” explained Tom. To ensure this, Whitecoat’s support is provided by dedicated points of contact, so everyone they speak to knows the details of their system and can resolve issues quickly, with clear lines of escalation to specialist engineers should a larger problem present itself.

“Working with the Jigsaw24 support team is a world away from our previous experiences. It’s been amazing. Whenever something goes wrong, someone’s instantly working to find a fix, and we trust the decisions that their team make.”